Savage Continent

[ivyfic]

Title: Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II
Author: Keith Lowe

This book is a necessary, if brutal, read. I read most of it over the weekend, and taken in such large chunks, it is numbing.

It details what happened in the years from roughly 1945 to 1949, breaking down events into the broad categories of the legacy of war, vengeance, ethnic cleansing and civil war. As an American, we have a tendency to see WWII in Europe as stopping on VE Day. Since all the wars we have fought for a hundred and fifty years have been overseas, there is a bright line between war and the resumption of civilian life. It is therefore easy to forget the extent of destruction in Europe: the millions dead; the almost complete destruction of infrastructure, economy, and social order; the complete breakdown of morality as so many who had suffered so much felt justified in taking what they wanted. This meant hundreds of thousands of rapes, revenge killings, pogroms...

I had no idea, for example, that there were more deportations after the war than during it, though those deportations were only made possible by the disintegration of the social fabric caused by the Nazi invasion. Since the Third Reich had used the existence of ethnic German minorities in places like the Sudetenland to justify their invasion, after the war, the Allies (particularly the Soviet Union) saw the best solution for lasting peace to be the mass deportation of Germans out of all other areas of Eastern Europe. But it was not just Germans--Poles were deported from the Ukraine, Ukrainians from Poland, Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, and the list goes on. These millions of people were marched or packed on trains and sent to places with no ability to house or feed them, with disastrous results.

So many people had made it through the horrors of the war only by clinging to the belief that, when it was over, they would go home, that discovering that for millions of them there was no home anymore was devastating. After the liberation of the concentration camps, many of the survivors found themselves back in Nazi camps, but this time ruled over by the Allies or the reasserted local governments, because there was simply no other place to put these people.

Lowe does a very good job of showing that there is no black and white when it comes to World War II, that there was no Europe rising nobly from the ashes. But he also points out the ways in which neo-fascists in recent years have used the fact of revenge killings to portray the Nazis as equal victims, which they were not. He is very clear to point out the controversial nature of the numbers of casualties he's using, since they have become tools of myth-making for both sides after the war.

The best summary, though, I think comes from his conclusion:

Given that the Germans were only one ingredient in the vast soup of different conflicts, it stands to reason that their defeat did not bring an end to the violence. In fact, the traditional view that the war came to an end when Germany finally surrendered in May 1945 is entirely misleading: in reality, their capitulation only brought an end to one aspect of the fighting. The related conflicts over race, nationality and politics continued for weeks, months and sometimes years afterwards. Gangs of Italians were still lynching Fascists late into the 1940s. Greek Communists and Nationalists, who first fought one another as opponents or collaborators with Germany, were still at each other's throats in 1949. The Ukrainian and Lithuanian partisan movements, born at the height of the war, were still fighting well into the mid-1950s. The Second World War was like a vast supertanker ploughing through the waters of Europe: it had such huge momentum that, while the engines might have been reversed in May 1945, its turbulent course was not finally brought to a halt until several years later.

Comments

[cathexys]

One of the things I forgot to mention but was thinking about when we talked about good texts was this 90s documentary that was really eye-opening to me. It's post-Holocaust, so pretty much as bad as it gets for all sorts of stuff, but also lots of fascinating info. I remember seeing it on TV, but I found it on YT: The Long Way Home (Wikipedia summary)